Salvatore Quasimodo

Born 20 August 1901, Salvatore Quasimodo came up in an Italy that would soon crack apart. His poetry compressed the tragic weight of the 20th century into lines stripped clean, classical in shape but contemporary in ache. By midcentury he stood beside Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale as one of the country's essential voices. In 1959 the Nobel committee gave him the literature prize for lyrical poetry that expressed, in their words, "the tragic experience of life in our own times" with classical fire. He died 14 June 1968, leaving work that refused to look away.